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Title: Psychology and the prevention of nuclear war

Book ·
OSTI ID:6769143

This book is about our ways of thinking and about how they need to be and can be changed. It is not about the ''unparalleled catastrophe.'' By now many of us know much about that, and unless we an see clear, acceptable, and practical ways to prevent it, our minds recoil from the whole horrible subject. Therefore, the book is about the prevention of nuclear war and nothing else. At least, that is its purpose. Yet its method is primarily descriptive and analytical rather than action-oriented. It explores from different perspectives the possible causes of a world war that could be at the outset, or become, nuclear, with a special focus on the often-neglected psychological aspects of those causes. It is diagnosis more than prescription. In fact, it might be described as a many-sided effort to understand the nature and roots of the ''madness'' of our present drift toward a great war that each side is urgently-desperately-anxious to avoid. In so doing it draws on some of the insights of psychiatry (from the psychiatrists Robert Jay Lifton, John E. Mack, Jerome D. Frank, and Erich Fromm), as well as on the three disciplines that provide the chief foundation for the book: history, political science, and social psychology.

OSTI ID:
6769143
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English